A decade after the Northern Territory intervention was accused of riding roughshod over remote Indigenous communities, with its forced land leases, changes to welfare and widespread alcohol bans, the Federal Indigenous Affairs Minister has admitted the top-down approach was flawed.

"I think it would have been far better to do some of the same things with the full compliance of the community rather than the community having the sense that it was imposed on us, so yes of course we could have done it better," Senator Nigel Scullion said

Senator Scullion made the comments during a recent visit to the central Australian community of Mutitjulu, the community at the front line of the Northern Territory Emergency Response known as "the intervention", launched unilaterally by the Howard Government 10 years ago today.

But Senator Scullion said no-one in Mutitjulu had asked him for an apology and, in spites of its flaws, the intervention had delivered benefits.

"You can't put $1.9 billion into housing and say it didn't affect things positively; there's a number of those processes ... the hundreds of millions of dollars that was invested additional in health and education, but there are elements and the principal element is disempowerment," Senator Scullion said.

He also said that at the time, the Commonwealth was seriously concerned about reports of child sexual abuse and neglect.

'A pre-election stunt' or in the name of child welfare

In 2007, the Howard government announced a national emergency and rolled out radical policies in the Northern Territory in response to the Little Children are Sacred report on child sexual abuse in NT Indigenous communities, called the Northern Territory Emergency Response.

Mr Howard said the Commonwealth had to act because the NT government of the day had taken too long to respond to the report, which called for urgent action.

"We believe that our responsibility to those children overrides any sensitivities of commonwealth/territory relations" John Howard said at the time.

The then NT chief minister Clare Martin condemned the intervention as a pre-election stunt.

When the Commonwealth rolled out its radical plan, with logistical support from the Army, it deployed federal police as well as medical teams for child health checks and follow-up treatment.

The measures included compulsory five-year land leases in 73 remote communities and widespread alcohol bans.

Thousands of people had half their welfare payments put onto a "basics card" for essential items and to do that the Commonwealth suspended the Racial Discrimination Act in the NT.

A member of the Commonwealth's "emergency response taskforce", a resident of the Naiyu community Miriam Rose-Baumann said at first she thought the intervention was an opportunity for change but then lost hope

"It felt like it was more top-down rather than grass roots level ... and there was no suggestion that they were going to take the community with them in trying to sort out what was needed in the community," she said.

To make matters worse, she said the NT Government's decision in 2008 to amalgamate local councils further eroded local community control.

After the 2007 election, under federal Labor, the intervention became a permanent fixture in the NT.

Has it made a difference?

Over the decade more than a billion dollars has been spent on housing in the NT but a lot of it replaced old stock and overcrowding continues.

"The investment in housing was terrific... but the net result was we didn't end up with more additional housing, and yet this is at a time where the Aboriginal population out bush has continued to grow quite rapidly," said the CEO of Darwin's Danila Dilba Health Service Olga Havnen.

Twenty thousand Territorians are now on income management, even though a report found scheme was not meeting its aims.

As for child protection, new figures presented by the Menzies School of Health research to the Royal Commission into the Protection and Detention of Children in the Northern Territory suggest the intervention has not made a difference.

"The data that we have shows that since the intervention rates of child protection notifications, substantiations and out of home care have all doubled and so if that's an outcome we're looking at, the intervention has really failed to make a difference for that particular outcome," the school's Sven Silburn said.

Professor Silburn said a "great mistake" of the intervention was the lack of proper community engagement, which he said might have given it a better chance of success.